Link buying is bad! Advertising is good? How does Google determine the difference? Is there a difference? I have an e-commerce site. All of my competitors advertise, some with text links, many with banners. I read that e-commerce sites are "expected" to advertise for a variety of reasons. When I review my competitors backlinks there are "hundreds" is not "thousands" of advertising backlinks from relevant blogs, sites.....My question is how do I advertise and should I advertise without incurring the wrath of a Google smack down? Am I the only one that does not understand the distinction? Is there a distinction. If I/we are not supposed to try and game the system, how do I advertise while buying links that are really advertising. Is this a non issue?
Link buying usually means you pay to get a clean text or image link to a page on your website which passes page rank and impacts on organic rankings in search. The only way to play by Google's rules is if you make sure the publisher nofollow's this link, in which case it will no longer impact organic search rankings. So it will then only benefit you by users clicking through from the site of the publisher of your paid link. Advertising networks such as Adwords, Clicksor, Buysellads, Bingads, etc. also will display your text or banner ads but the publisher of the ads will not pass any page rank or link juice to you, so again traffic and not organic search rankings will be the benefit. If you want to be sure not to run foul of Google at some stage or other than this approach and nofollow paid links are safest. If you want to improve rankings then look at guest posting and other white hat link building approaches or do a lot of research and then hire a reputable SEO company to do the work for you.
Edstorm has given you an excellent answer. I would add that link diversification is also very important both in respect of the types of sites you get links from and also the variation of your anchor text. Most companies will be buying links one way or another so you'll find it difficult if you don't and you're in a competitive niche. If you do buy links, just make sure you diversify and keep it quiet.
I use White Hat SEO methods only when it comes to increasing visibility of my online business and only syndicate my content on multiple social platforms with automated content distribution. it's the best online marketing practice to wait it out and not resort to purchasing links in hopes of inflating your self to the top of the search engine results pages, simply because in the in, you will crash and burn your blog or website and possibly get delisted from search engines. I never purchased links for my site a day life and would rather wait it out one proof my search engine marketing no matter how long it takes to rank good in search engine results pages.